The problem this solves
Google and Facebook hand over your back catalogue when you connect them. ProductReview and Trustpilot do not: they reach Dinopix by email forwarding, so we only ever see reviews written after you set the forwarding up.
Left alone, that makes your average wrong. A business with 200 reviews at 4.5 that receives three 2-star reviews in its first week would show 2.0, because those three are all Dinopix has seen.
Enter the review counts already on your ProductReview listing so your average is right from day one.
Entering a baseline
- Go to Platforms and open ProductReview or Trustpilot.
- Find Baseline ratings.
- Enter how many 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 star reviews the listing already has. Read the counts off your public listing page.
- Save. The calculated average is shown as you type, so you can check it against what the platform displays.
If your calculated average does not match the platform's, your counts are wrong somewhere. Platforms round, so a difference in the second decimal is fine; a difference of half a star is not.
How baselines are used
- Counted in: your average rating and total review count on the dashboard and in Analytics.
- Not counted in: anything that needs the review itself. There is no text, no author and no date, so baselines never appear in your reviews list, never get sentiment, and are never replied to.
Keeping it current
The baseline is a fixed snapshot of history, not a live figure. Reviews that arrive by email afterwards are added on top, so you do not need to keep editing it. Only revisit it if you notice the total drifting from the platform, which usually means some forwarded mail never arrived. See ProductReview troubleshooting.
Why this is not automatic
Reading those counts would mean scraping the platform, which their terms do not allow and which breaks whenever they change their page. A number you type once is more reliable than one we guess.